Senate removes President Dilma from office

‘Twice I have seen the face of death’

BRASILIA: Brazil’s Senate removed leftist President Dilma Rousseff from office on Wednesday for breaking budgetary laws, in an impeachment process that has polarised the Latin American country and paralysed its politics for nine months.

Senators voted 61-20 to convict Rousseff for illegally using money from state banks to boost public spending.

Her conservative former Vice President Michel Temer, who has run the country since her suspension in May, will be sworn to serve out the remainder of her term through 2018.

A separate vote will be held on whether Rousseff will be barred from public office for eight years.

Dilma Rousseff survived torture as a guerrilla opposing Brazil’s military dictatorship before rising to become president, but plunged from the heights to end up fired in an impeachment trial on Wednesday.

The last time she faced trial is immortalized in a classic black and white photograph from 1970. Rousseff, then 22, sits with a defiant look on her face as a military court judges her for belonging to a Marxist underground group.

Few would have imagined at the time that the young rebel in jeans and t-shirt would become Brazil’s first female president. Or that later she would be back on trial, this time in the Senate, sternly looking her accusers in the eye.

Brazil’s 68-year-old "Iron Lady" stood accused of breaking accounting laws by letting her government take unauthorized loans to fill holes in the budget during her re-election race in 2014.

True to her fiery past, Rousseff called the impeachment a "coup."

During mostly measured testimony at her trial, she briefly faltered and looked close to tears while recalling her suffering as a young leftist guerrilla and during a later battle with cancer.

"Twice I have seen the face of death close up," she said. "When I was tortured for days on end, subjected to abuses that make us doubt humanity and the meaning of life itself, and when a serious and extremely painful illness could have cut short my life," she said.

"Today I fear only for the death of democracy, for which many of us here in this chamber fought."

Rousseff came to power in a 2010 election as the handpicked Workers’ Party candidate to succeed the hugely popular Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the left-wing party’s founder.